An international journalists association in Beijing said Friday that its Web site was the target of cyberattacks, the latest in a string of incidents that have affected foreign journalists in China.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said in a statement that it disabled its Web site temporarily to deal with the problem after it experienced persistent attacks over two days involving a flood of traffic that overwhelmed its servers. Such attacks, while making a site inaccessible to regular visitors, are different from those that seek to gain unauthorized access to a Web site's administration.
The group – which has around 400 members and lists the improvement of working conditions for journalists in China as one of its priorities – doesn't know the motivation of its attackers or where the denial-of-service attacks originated except that they were routed through servers in both China and the U.S., the statement said.
The statement comes just days after the Foreign Correspondents Club of China reported finding eight cases of hacks into the e-mail accounts of journalists based in China and Taiwan in recent weeks.
In one case, a Beijing-based journalist's Yahoo Inc. email account had an unknown forwarding address added, and all messages were sent to an unknown recipient, according to the group. In January, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China said some of its members' Google Inc. Gmail accounts were hijacked and forwarded to an unknown address.
A Yahoo spokesman couldn't be reached for comment. Google declined to comment.
It's unclear whether the reports of email account breaches were specifically targeted at journalists, or if the journalists' accounts were part of wider attacks or phishing scams.
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China said its tracing of the most recent attacks to its Web site to Chinese servers is inconclusive. "The physical location of the servers does not tell us much since hackers can use any machine they have been able to exploit," the group's statement said. "We are currently working with our technical advisers to find out more information."
Google announced in January that it was the target of a sophisticated cyberattack originating from China that appeared to be primarily aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The company said it discovered that separately, the Gmail accounts of dozens of China human rights advocates around the world had been routinely accessed by third parties.
Chinese officials have denied all accusations of cyberattacks, saying that China has laws against hacking, and calling the allegations groundless. When asked about cyberattacks originating in China at a regular press briefing on Thursday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Qin Gang said claims of hacker attacks from China or the Chinese government without conclusive evidence are "irresponsible and have ulterior motives."
Mr. Qin said such "groundless attacks and malicious distortions against China" that appear on the Internet daily could themselves be described as cyberattacks. "Isn't this also a kind of cyberattack on China?" he asked rhetorically. "We firmly oppose this kind of cyberattack against China."
**Loretta Chao at loretta.chao@wsj.com and Aaron Back at aaron.back@dowjones.com
